Comment by idle_zealot

Comment by idle_zealot 3 months ago

> Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic.

> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.

It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication. For a brief period we had some social media platforms that made gestures in the direction of free communication. Then the investor capital came rolling in, and they were expected to increase revenue. How do you increase revenue of your free communication platform? You sell the messaging. Call it promotion, advertising, whatever. The only thing of value you have at your disposal are people's eyeball, you're going to sell what they see. You could ask your users to pay for the service... but then 80% of them will flake to a rival service that's still free. If there's a way to marry the profit motive and a truly democratic social media platform then our best and brightest have yet to find it. I suspect it doesn't exist.

swed420 3 months ago

> It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication.

Exactly.

It seems the only way to sidestep this growing problem is to create a profit free platform, and view it almost as a utility but is openly owned and controlled by "the people."

The vTaiwan and g0v ("gov zero") projects are relevant starter examples for a newer type of distributed governance:

https://www.stearthinktank.com/post/deconstructing-binary-ci...

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Nasrudith 2 months ago

That reminds me of the surprising and perverse effects witnessed during the Roman Empire's downward spiral.
One of the reforms was going from citizen soldiers who must provide their own gear to government provided weaponry and armor. Despite on its face being more egalitarian this resulted instead in consolidation of personal power and lead to more stratification. Quartermasters became kingmakers, just like how coups were lead by quartermasters in the Napoleonic era as they controlled food and provided payment.
There must always be an owner and don't trust "the people" to be anything more than a populist's device to assign legitimacy to their supporters and other dissenters.

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- swed420 2 months ago
  
  > There must always be an owner and don't trust "the people" to be anything more than a populist's device to assign legitimacy to their supporters and other dissenters.
  That's a false dichotomy, especially in the example of vTaiwan, since it was a creation that operated in parallel with an already existing government.
  Basically, the platform itself didn't have any direct political power because at the end of the day it was "just an app" or series of apps.
  However, even without official power, its low barrier to public consensus building (that you call populism) enabled an efficient and highly organized form of government critique and accountability. This created a near realtime public awareness of the real world intricacies of problem X, Y, or Z that did not exist previously, and put pressure on the politicians in power to take these conclusions/demands somewhat seriously. It also literally helped them do their jobs better, and was far more responsive and precise than traditional electoral implementations.
  
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